Your project folder

What gets created

When you point LongClaw at a folder, it creates one directory inside it:

your-project/└── .longclaw/    ├── longclaw.yaml            the project's name, key, theme, people, and labels    ├── AGENTS.md                the editing contract agents read    └── tickets/        └── LC-1/            ├── ticket.md        the whole ticket            └── attachments/     files attached to it

That is everything.

LongClaw writes inside .longclaw/ and nowhere else

It does not touch your source files, your README, or a root AGENTS.md you already keep. The contract it maintains is .longclaw/AGENTS.md, which is a different file on purpose.

The project key

The LC in LC-1 prefixes every ticket key and every ticket directory name.

A key is one or more characters, uppercase ASCII letters and digits only, starting with a letter — LC, LC2, L. A ticket key is <KEY>-<n> or <KEY>-<n><s>, where n carries no leading zero and s is a single lowercase letter — LC-42, LC-211p. The creation surfaces cap a new key at five characters for readability.

Both forms are keys. The trailing letter exists because keys are allocated from the ticket directories in one working tree, so a second branch, worktree or clone reads a lower maximum and mints the same number again. The letter is drawn at random, so the two keys differ even when the numbers collide. Tickets minted before it existed keep the keys they were minted with — a key is never reused and never renamed.

The key becomes immutable once the first ticket exists. Changing it would mean renaming every human-facing ticket key and every directory.

Because the prefix is the project key, it also says which project a ticket directory belongs to. A directory under .longclaw/tickets/ whose prefix is not this project’s key is not this project’s ticket, however well-formed its contents are — it is shown as degraded with a diagnostic naming both keys, rather than indexed. It is never renamed, moved, or rewritten into conformity.

What lives outside your project

One thing: the list of folders you have opened, in ~/Library/Application Support/io.longclaw.desktop/. Losing it costs you nothing but re-opening your folders. No ticket data lives there.